"The more you put things together, the more they fall apart..."

I find this particularly true of my relationship with computers. I have a few basic computer skills and knowledges and can more or less fix problems as they occur. But, like a doctor who can tell at a glance whether his cough was caused by a bit of cheese going down the wrong way or a serious accumulation of poisonous gunk in his lungs (stop me if I’m getting too Jennifer Aniston with my scientific jargon), I seem to suffer more PC afflictions than the average person. Which is odd as I’m very average indeed. On a good day. Whether everyone else just puts up with this little niggles (or doesn’t even notice them in the first place) I cannot say but if I find a problem I will try and fix it.

And so more things fall apart.

It wasn’t anything especially major this time – just a reluctance on the part of Windows XP to automatically configure my network. By which I mean my Mac getting its vital net-blood via the PC. I would have to run the Network Setup Wizard every damn time (after a reboot) if I wanted to use my Mac online. Which was a pain in the arse. And then my Norton suite stopped updating itself. I had a vague idea that some new fangled virus might have disabled it but it was more likely just a bit of old fashioned corruption. Well, it was Friday night after all.

So I decided to do what any lonely nerd would do of a Saturday. I got out my all important box of ultra crucial top priority discs (cunningly labelled "Discs" to fool any burglar in a hurry) and popped Partition Magic in the floppy disc drive. The old 3.5 incher is a dying breed. They won’t be around much longer and it isn’t any great surprise. Like DOS it has outlived its usefulness. Though when push comes to crisis it is always the old fashioned remedies which prove most effective. The machine booted into the modified DOS contained on the first floppy and then loaded Partition Magic. I had never bothered buying partitioning software because it seemed such a waste. The ultimate example of a product you would use once and never need again. Oh me of little faith. It comes in handy every few months and, even though I didn’t technically speaking buy it, it always lives near the top of my all important box of ultra crucial top priority discs.

For those that don’t know (which is any of you with a wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend or miscellaneous social life) Partition Magic lets one build little walls on ones hard drive which turns one drive into several smaller ones. It’s like pouring a bottle of wine into glasses but without the careful manipulation to ensure you get more "by accident". The advantages of partitioning are that you can put all your programs on one drive and all your data on another. Thus if your software corrupts you can replace it without needing to remotely back up your data. Or in the current instance it was easier than putting it onto a couple of CDs and then back again. So I split my drive into two more or less equal halves, put all my data onto the newly formed, almost virginal, D drive and entered Phase Two.

It was back into Partition Magic to erase the C drive. There was no good to be got by papering over the cracks. It had to be an entirely new Windows or nothing at all. And since I couldn’t do this with nothing at all it had to be an entirely new Windows. The C drive was erased in a matter of seconds and, removing the floppy disc, I popped the Windows XP disc into my bootable DVD drive.

Another heads up to the socially adept, your computer is switches on and boots into Windows. Except that before it goes to your hard drive for Windows it looks first at the floppy drive and then possibly your CD/DVD drive. The boot order can be manually configured and is one of the most important things that the average PC user knows nothing about. With the death of the floppy disc drive it is essential that PCs are shipped with their DVD drive as bootable. Windows is not a stable operating system and having it as the primary bootable drive is insane. You can manually configure it in the BIOS but I’ve long since forgotten how to get into my BIOS and yours are probably in a different place anyway. Do what I did and buy a Linux installation which doesn’t work – that’ll teach you endless useful things about the inner workings of a computer.

I have a saying. Whenever I type in my Windows XP serial number I know I will have to type it several more times before things work properly. I can never remember a time when a single dose of Windows installer was enough. I’d tried reinstalling over the existing installation the night before so as I tapped in the handy twenty five digit number I remembered the wisdom of my saying. Because it’s true like all those other sayings are true. Because they’re wise. There is something oddly soul destroying about the Windows installation. Maybe it is the propaganda on screens about how it is going to make your computer bigger, better, faster, stronger, more reliable and less prone to being like a Microsoft product. Or maybe it is that any tiny mistake or hiccough on the machine’s part will render your computer totally useless and you’ll have to start everything again. Or perhaps it is the idea of being able to wipe the slate clean and start anew in exactly the same way that you can’t in real life.

And then, finally, it boots into a clean desktop. The screen settings need changing – the refresh rate defaults to such a low level that a couple of minutes of it can give me a headache – and I have my familiar customisations to do. Being a Mac user by choice (and an extreme myopic by design) I like to have big icons at the bottom of the screen. Though Windows can never provide anything as groovy and pant wettingly exciting as the Apple OSX Dock it can do enough to avoid the tedious chore that is use of the Start menu. With my little tinkerings in place it is time to install some proper software. Every time I do this I promise myself I will keep it simple. A few essential programmes and nothing more. Nothing that will bog me down in resource hogging hidden features. Nothing that will make my drive bulge and swell like a wasp that is behind on its stinging duties.

First and most important is Norton. Not the slimy spy of Colony in Space fame but the internet security people whose software has as many fans as it does enemies. For every secure person who sleeps easier in their e-bed thanks to Mr Norton there is another who will not rest until he wrests back control of his computer from the damn firewall he just spent thirty quid on. With my virus scanner and firewall installed and updated (which took three goes as some updates require previous updates to be installed first and it all becomes as complicated as Sandra only going to the disco if Tiffany is going and Tiffany will only go if Amber is going but Lucy isn’t going because Lucy is going out with Dwayne who used to go out with Tiffany before she dumped him because he was… and so on) it was time to move on to other things.

The origins of my Microsoft Office disc needn’t be discussed. Suffice it to say that this website and all who sail in her wouldn’t be where they are today without it. There are plenty of website suites which are better than FrontPage but FP happens to be the one that I taught myself to use and all the others (such as Dreamweaver) look too much like hard work. I’m a lazy arse at heart and, like my little Micra, FrontPage gets me from D to E. That’s D as in my local drive and E as in e- the digital prefix. It was a clever play on words which didn’t work and needed to be explained. Crashing on.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 is a damn fine image editor. I’ve got a copy of Photoshop somewhere but I prefer PSE2. Photoshop is too big and demanding for me. I have a short attention span and like everything to be there to play with as the mood takes me. Better still, PSE2 comes with Mac and Windows versions on the same disc so I can play happily on either machine. That was the main reason for getting it but having used it I can happily renounce my previous loyalty to Paint Shop Pro. Though it is the talent and the imagination of the user which is most important – many visual offences are committed when the talentless are let loose with six hundred pounds of Photoshop power.

As far as maintenance is concerned I like Internet Cleanup. It seems to change ownership on a regular basis and it does exactly what it says on the page. It cleans up ones internet files. I have no doubts that my surfing habits are no more or less disreputable and embarrassing as your own but seeing how much accumulates in a short time is surprising. Thousands upon thousands of little files that are the PC equivalent of dust. So you use Internet Cleanup as your e-duster. I’m currently on version 3 which was given away on one of those computer magazine discs. I thought about upgrading to v4 but since v3 only seems to have a different colour scheme to the v2 I bought some years ago and the demo of v4 screwed a previous system by not letting me uninstall it and reinstall v3 once the trial was over I haven’t bothered.

One of the more irritating things about erasing the past and starting again is the loss of fonts. I do a fair amount of graphic daubing for the site and regularly download fonts which suit a particular mood or item. Imagine the annoyance when one opens the file and finds that said font is missing. That’s why I tend to get all my fonts from one particular site. It makes it easier to recover them as and when. But the recent Only Fools font was harder to track down and I am forever forgetting to back Assiduous up for the PS graphics that are needed from time to time.

And with all that done it was time to download the Windows updates from Microsoft. Why the wait, I hear you ask. Well there has been a lot of talk about Service Pack 2 – a three hundred million dollar improvement to Windows XP that has taken many months of patient coding and rigour. So I was holding fire until that was available. It still made me download all the others before it would let me have SP2 so I needn’t have waited. Hey ho. If you haven’t already done so (or your machine hasn’t already done so for you in the background) you should go to Windows Updates and get SP2. It is a biggie (about 75mb) but it is supposed to make your PC more secure.

I hope I’ve not bored you too much with this geekish ramble. The time wasn’t entirely wasted as there were long enough runs of automatic configuring, downloading and installing for me to read four Short Trips stories. It’s also left me, touch wooden effect desk, with a better system to work with. And writing this piece has (temporarily at least) shaken me out of the laziness that has made recent updates rarer than a crumb on John Prescott’s dinner plate.